UNITED STATES AND CANADA An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean. By Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Pp. xviii, 357. $55.00, cloth; $22.50, paper

In the last half-century, historians have reached a consensus about much of the history of British America during the eighteenth century. One feature of that consensus, argued by Jack Greene, John Philip Reid, and Stanley Engerman among others, is that the economic, legal, political, and social history of the colonies can only be understood in the context of their membership in an Atlantic community. Even the event that destroyed that community—the American Revolution—is now seen as a controversy over an Atlantic constitution. In this book, Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy fills a major lacuna in this approach, by asking why the Caribbean colonists did not join the revolution.